Seeding, Plating and Electrical Characterization of Gold Nanowires Formed on Self-Assembled DNA Nanotubes.

Dulashani R Ranasinghe,Basu R Aryal,Rebecca Schulman,Adam T Woolley,Tyler R Westover,Sisi Jia,Robert C Davis,John N Harb

doi:10.3390/molecules25204817

Dulashani R Ranasinghe, Basu R Aryal + Show 6 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules25204817

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Abstract

Self-assembly nanofabrication is increasingly appealing in complex nanostructures, as it requires fewer materials and has potential to reduce feature sizes. The use of DNA to control nanoscale and microscale features is promising but not fully developed. In this work, we study self-assembled DNA nanotubes to fabricate gold nanowires for use as interconnects in future nanoelectronic devices. We evaluate two approaches for seeding, gold and palladium, both using gold electroless plating to connect the seeds. These gold nanowires are characterized electrically utilizing electron beam induced deposition of tungsten and four-point probe techniques. Measured resistivity values for 15 successfully studied wires are between 9.3 × 10−6 and 1.2 × 10−3 Ωm. Our work yields new insights into reproducible formation and characterization of metal nanowires on DNA nanotubes, making them promising templates for future nanowires in complex electronic circuitry.

Highlights

Nanofabrication, which is used to construct structures and devices with minimum dimensions below 100 nm [1], is having a significant impact on diverse areas, such as electronics, biomedicine, materials and so forth [2]
The DNA nanotubes were 1 to 10 μm in length have been deposited on oxidized Si wafers
These results demonstrate that the DNA nanotubes were well-formed during the DNA nanotubes

Summary

Introduction

Nanofabrication, which is used to construct structures and devices with minimum dimensions below 100 nm [1], is having a significant impact on diverse areas, such as electronics, biomedicine, materials and so forth [2]. Most current nanofabrication relies on top-down technology [3], which is highly automated and expensive and requires complicated instrumentation [4]. Nanofabrication could benefit from alternative techniques, including bottom-up approaches wherein chemical or physical forces operating at the nanoscale assemble smaller parts into larger structures [5]. DNA is one of the best studied bottom-up nanofabrication systems. The concept of using DNA as a nanoscale building material, though prevalent in Nature, was first explored experimentally by Nadrian Seeman in the 1980s [7]. In 2006, Rothemund demonstrated that DNA nanostructures with well-defined shapes could be constructed by repeated folding of a long, single-stranded DNA (scaffold) with hundreds of short, synthetic, single-stranded (staple) DNAs to create 2-D objects about

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